(including the one you picked) appears in figure 5. But when there is some possibility that the magician knows your chosen card–either by sleight of hand, shrewd deduction or telepathy–and when your jiggly eyes are not looking directly at the first group of six as it transforms into the second group of five, the illusion can be quite powerful. Indeed, when the trick first appeared on a website, some of the smartest scientists I know hypothesized that a newfangled technology was allowing the server to guess their card by tracking the speed and acceleration of their keystrokes. I personally removed my hand from the mouse just to make sure that its subtle movements were not being measured. It did not occur to me until the third time through that while I had seen the first group of six cards, I had only remembered my verbal label for the card I had chosen, and hence had failed to notice that all the other cards had changed as well.27 What’s important to note for our purposes is that card tricks like this work for precisely the same reason that people find it difficult to say how happy they were in their previous marriages.
Fig. 5
Happy Talk
Reba and Lori Schappell claim to be happy, and that disturbs us. We are rock-solid certain that it just can’t be true, and yet, it looks as though there is no foolproof method for comparing their happiness with our own. If they say they are happy, then on what basis can we conclude that they are wrong? Well, we might try the more lawyerly tactic of questioning their ability to know, evaluate or describe their own experience. ‘They may think they’re happy’, we could say, ‘but that’s only because they don’t know what happiness really is.’ In other words, because Lori and Reba have never had many of the experiences that we singletons have had–spinning cartwheels in a meadow, snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef, strolling down the avenue without drawing a crowd–we suspect they may have an impoverished background of happy experiences that leads them to evaluate their lives differently than the rest of us would. If, for instance, we were to give the twins a birthday cake, hand them an eight-point rating scale (which can be thought of as an artificial language with eight words for different intensities of happiness), and ask them to report on their subjective experience, they might tell us they felt a joyful eight. But isn’t it likely that their eight and our eight represent fundamentally different levels of joy, and that their use of the eight-word language is distorted by their unenviable situation, which has never allowed them to discover how happy a person can really be? Lori and Reba may be using the eight-word language differently than we do because for them, birthday cake is as good as it gets. They label their happiest experience with the happiest word in the eight-word language, naturally, but this should not cause us to overlook the fact that the experience they call eight is an experience that we might call four and a half. In short, they don’t mean happy the way we mean happy. Figure 6 shows how an impoverished experiential background can cause language to be squished so that the full range of verbal labels is used to describe a restricted range of experiences. By this account, when the twins say they are ecstatic, they are actually feeling what we feel when we say we are pleased.
Squishing Language
The nice things about this language-squishing hypothesis are (a) it suggests that everyone everywhere has the same subjective experience when they receive a birthday cake even if they describe that experience differently, which makes the world a rather simple place to live and bake; and (b) it allows us to go on believing that despite what they say about themselves, Lori and Reba aren’t really happy after all, and thus we are perfectly justified in preferring our lives to theirs. The less nice things about this hypothesis are numerous, and if we worry that Lori and Reba use the eight-word language differently than we do because they have never enjoyed the thrill of a cartwheel, then we had better worry about a few other matters too. For instance, we had better worry that we have never felt the overwhelming sense of peace and security that comes from knowing that a beloved sibling is always by our side, that we will never lose her friendship no matter what kind of crummy stuff we may say or do on a bad day, that there will always be someone who knows us as well as we know ourselves, shares our hopes, worries our worries, and so on. If they haven’t had our experiences, then we haven’t had theirs either, and it is entirely possible that we are the ones with the squished language–that when we say we feel overjoyed, we have no idea what we are talking about because we have never experienced the companionate love, the blissful union, the unadulterated agape that Lori and Reba have. And all of us–you, me, Lori, Reba–had better worry that there are experiences far better than those we have had so far–the experience of flying without a plane, of seeing our children win Academy Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, of meeting God and learning the secret handshake–and that everyone’s use of the eight-word language is defective and that no one knows what happiness really is. By that reasoning, we should all follow Solon’s advice and never say we are happy until we are dead because otherwise, if the real thing ever does come along, we will have used up the word and won’t have any way to tell the newspapers about it.
But these are just the preliminary worries. There are more. If we wanted to do a thought experiment whose results would demonstrate once and for all that Lori and Reba just don’t know what happiness really is, perhaps we should imagine that with a wave of a magic wand we could split them apart and allow them to experience life as singletons. If after a few weeks on their own they came to us, repudiated their former claims and begged not to be changed back to their former state, shouldn’t that convince us, as it has apparently convinced them, that they were previously confusing their fours and eights? We’ve all known someone who had a religious conversion, went through a divorce or survived a heart attack and now claims that her eyes are open for the very first time–that despite what she thought and said in her previous incarnation, she was never really happy until now. Are the people who have undergone such marvellous metamorphoses to be taken at their word?
Not necessarily. Consider a study in which volunteers were shown some quiz-show questions and asked to estimate the likelihood that they could answer them correctly. Some volunteers were shown only the questions (the question-only group), while others were shown both the questions and the answers (the question-and-answer group). Volunteers in the question-only group thought the questions were quite difficult, while those in the question-and-answer group–who saw both the questions (‘What did Philo T. Farnsworth invent?’) and the answers (‘The television set’)–believed that they could have answered the questions easily had they never seen the answers at all. Apparently, once volunteers knew the answers, the questions seemed simple (‘Of course it was the television–everyone knows that!’), and the volunteers were no longer able to judge how difficult the questions would seem to someone who did not share their knowledge of the answers.28
Studies such as these demonstrate that once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. To the judge’s dismay, the jury cannot disregard the prosecutor’s snide remarks. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the nightstand when we find it convenient to do so but like a pair of contacts that are forever affixed to our eyeballs with superglue. Once we learn to read, we can never again see letters as mere inky
